Family and Intimate Life: A Sociological Perspective

Running head: FAMILY AND INTIMATE LIFE
FAMILY AND INTIMATE LIFE
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1FAMILY AND INTIMATE LIFE
There are various social institutions which work together to perform a lot of activities
to ensure that the social stability is maintained and the society works mellifluously. These
institutions can be studied from different sociological perspectives, which helps to analyse
them from a practical point of view and assess their utility in maintaining social harmony. In
this essay, I intend to focus on the issue of ‘Family’ and its various dimensions, which would
be studied as a social institution, taking into consideration how the family and the intimate
lives of people develop and work as a social construct, rather than a biological, and thereby
ensures the progress of the entire society. I would attempt to study ‘family and intimate life’
from a nuanced sociological approach, which would take into consideration various
sociological theories like individualization, functionalism, conflict theory, or symbolic
interactionism (Woodman, Threadgold and Possamai-Inesedy 2015). This essay would be
closely related to my previous weekly assignments.
As a social construct, the stereotypic view hold that a family refers to the cohabitation
of individuals, which involves a married couple and their children, and sometimes also the
grandparents of the children or other blood relatives, all of whom share an intimate bonding
of love and mutual respect among themselves (Dempsey and Lindsay 2014). However, the
modern society has broken these stereotypes time and again, with evolving trends of
relationship, especially within the familial space. These changes can be attributed to the
changing patterns of romantic love between couples, from which the changes enter into the
familial space. Unlike the previous times, in the modern world, many couples prefer to
cohabit for a particular period of time before entering the legal bond of marriage, chiefly in
order to assess the durability of their emotional ties and wavelengths or their intimacy
(Bauman 2003).
Many sociologists rightly claim that the changes has been triggered by the rapid
advancement of technology and industrialization, and more importantly the empowerment of

2FAMILY AND INTIMATE LIFE
women in the recent past, which is supported by the theory of individualization (Woodman,
Threadgold and Possamai-Inesedy 2015). As such, these changes enter into the intimate life
of the domestic front, where the modern dimensions of conjugal love has a significant
bearing on the maturity and growth of the children as a social being. These developments of
the children depend on the socializing values that are inculcated to the children and a constant
monitoring of their implementation and associated growth of the children. Different
wavelengths of intimacy in the domestic front shapes this growth accordingly, which the
children then learn to compare with the other existing domains of intimacy in the society
(Giordano, Manning and Longmore 2015). This leads to a plurality of outlook which has a
direct effect on their growth as a social being. There is a raging debate pertaining to the issue
of children’s maturity rate. While some sociologists claim that the excessive use of
technology in the very normative years, shuns the socializing principle within the child,
whereas others claim that it enhances the rate of mental maturity within children (Ahn 2012).
The theory of individualization leads to that of symbolic interactions, which studies
and tries to define the various patterns of interaction that occurs within the family members
and its resultant intimacy within them (Denzin 2016). These involves a study of the rate of
the shared interests and mutual understanding that exists within a couple as well as among all
the members. Each have their individual method of communicating, and this is affected by
the social class to which the family belongs. The rate of similarity and difference in
communication standards among these individuals have a direct influence on the rate of
maturity of the children and determines the kind of individual the child would grow up to be
(Ariès 1962). More the difference among the parents’ communication standards, more time-
taking and complex being the child would grow up to be. This communication standards
again determines the quality of relationship. The standards of communication are highly
shaped by the sociological factors around an individuals’ environment, which moulds the